Rob Savage has a curious tendency. He doesn’t just tell a story, he tells it twice, and from different angles. His modern classic “Host,” about an online seance that goes awry at the start of the COVID lockdown, and his follow-up “Dashcam,” about a MAGA conspiracy kook live-streaming her run-in with the occult, were both about the dangers of abdicating social responsibility in real life and online, but neither made the exact same point. They’re vital companion pieces, even though “Dashcam” is such an accurate portrayal of radical right-wing aggravation that the film itself is annoying to watch.
His third movie, “The Boogeyman,” was about a supernatural entity that manipulates, deceives and threatens to destroy a suburban family, and his fourth, “Other Mommy,” has the same one-sentence synopsis. But while “The Boogeyman” was a rote trauma monster thriller, where the entity flimsily represents grief and mental illness, “Other Mommy” is infinitely more insidious. Savage’s latest finds unspeakable terror inside a child’s unspoken fear that something about her family is wrong. The demon doesn’t represent a very bad thing that happened; it represents a young girl’s inability to process the fact that bad things are unavoidable, and how that leaves her vulnerable to exploitation.
For about half the movie “Other Mommy” is incredibly unnerving. There are moments of physical and psychological grotesquerie that worm their way into your brain and lay slimy eggs in the contours. But as Savage’s film gets more specific, and develops fairy tale lore which lays the foundation for a potentially happy ending, the evils of “Other Mommy” lose their power. It’s a great scary film until we find out it’s leading to a mundane, reassuring message.
“Other Mommy” stars Arabella Olivia Clark as Bela, a little girl living in a nice house with a stay-at-home dad, Russell (Jay Duplass) and a working mom, Ursula (Jessica Chastain). Like many films about modern families, the fact that one of the parents works instead of spending all their time with their children is portrayed as a character flaw, and not a pragmatic, albeit unfortunate fact of life. Then again “Other Mommy” is told entirely from the child’s perspective, and when you’re little you don’t understand much about paying the bills. You just know Daddo is the one who tucks you into bed every night, and Mommy is the one who occasionally shows up in time to boop your nose and turns the lights out.
With actual mommy unavailable, literally and emotionally, Bela turns to Other Mommy for affection. Other Mommy looks just like Ursula, but with a strained, rictus smile and a limited understanding about humanity. Sometimes the only way to tell the difference is because Other Mommy is floating a few inches off the ground. Other times, the only way Bela can tell is because Other Mommy accidentally gives herself too many fingers. And sometimes Other Mommy stops trying and wraps its limbs around Bela like flesh-color boa constrictors, while her head balloons to disturbing proportions, in an image that will haunt me for years to come.
Most supernatural films about imaginary friends contrive excuses for the child to see the spirit while the adults are oblivious. “Other Mommy” rips that away quickly, when an early, disturbing visitation is interrupted by Russell, who sees Other Mommy contorted grotesquely under the kitchen counter. Before long both parents are aware that there’s an entity targeting their daughter and they flee the scene of the haunting, convinced that the creature is real but having no idea what that means, what the rules are, and how to save their lives. Which is believable, since if any of us found out monsters were real we wouldn’t know which mythology was real either, but also cloying, since the film officially become too self-aware to terrify.
That’s a pity, because until then “Other Mommy” is a seriously freaky film. Jessica Chastain fought an unearthly entity targeting her kids before, in Andy Muschietti’s excellent 2013 film “Mama,” and now she gets to be the witch in the candy house, luring an impressionable youth away from her real, (arguably) loving family. Other Mommy, a shapeshifter whose earnest attempts to comfort Bela are more disturbing than when she’s trying to scare Bela’s family on purpose, is a potentially iconic horror villain. She’s every despicable, exploitative person you’re afraid your children will turn to if you fail as a parent.
Unfortunately, as “Other Mommy” unfolds, the story starts twisting itself until its vague, universal horrors become specific, uninteresting plot points. There’s a long digression with paranormal investigators that plays like a different, worse movie, and it derails the personal nature of the film. When we discover there is a way to (potentially) defeat Other Mommy, it makes all the other efforts to kill it with knives and guns look like a preposterous waste of time. Of course you can’t kill a godlike extradimensional trickster demon with… is that a potato masher? Does Ursula actually think a potato masher is Other Mommy’s kryptonite.
Scary movies about subconscious anxieties are easy to conceive but nearly impossible to conclude. Either the protagonists speed run through some therapy or the monster wins. The therapy ending is usually anticlimactic and the downbeat ending can, if a filmmaker isn’t careful, make it look like there’s no actual hope for people with mental health issues. Jennifer Kent’s “The Babadook” arguably found the perfect balance but most filmmakers pick one problematic finale or another. Rob Savage’s film, adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel “Incidents Around the House” by screenwriter Nathan Elston (“Succession”), picks the ending that undercuts the rest of the experience — not just in its simplistic concept, but also its hokey execution.
Still, in aggregate, “Other Mommy” mostly works. It’s got a spectacular monster and a spectacularly monstrous performance, which makes the entity as much of a character as it is a metaphor. The front-loaded scares and increasingly arch, unbelievable conclusion make Savage’s film inconsistent yet ideal for slumber parties, where you want to shriek and shriek but actually get some sleep eventually. At least until mom comes in with milk and cookies, which seems nice until you realize she’s eight feet tall and smiling at you. Smiling. Smiling a little too wide.
“Other Mommy” is now playing exclusively in theaters.
